After experience
Oh God what a self-righteous prat I was! In saying 'Oh God', I'm not invoking you, God, but rather, something in me that desires I don't know what – not to be stupid – infantile, kicking against the pricks. Rather, to understand the pricks, how they come to be. Not from a God 'out there' who makes rules about trees arbitrarily, but from an inward, an aesthetic sense of how, in a fallen world, there should be, is, something to redeem experience – maybe you, God, dying with us on a cross. Of all the stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of experience, maybe that one comes closest to a truth, resolves most questions, touches us most nearly. So if I feel regret, it's not for loss but something not yet found, a how-to-be that is not only moral but which has the fierce joy of living gloriously.
Nicholas Bielby
This poem is reprinted with permission from Nicholas Bielby's collection The Possibility of Innocence, reviewed on page 26.